This article describes the development and validation of a diagnostic test of German and its integration in a programme of formative assessment during a one-year initial teacher-training course. The test focuses on linguistic aspects that cause difficulty for trainee teachers of German as a foreign language and assesses implicit and explicit…

Securing data on students' academic achievement is typically one of the most important and costly aspects of conducting education experiments. As state assessment programs have become practically universal and more uniform in terms of grades and subjects tested, the relative appeal of using state tests as a source of study outcome measures has…

Background: There is an urgent need for developing reliable, valid and practical instruments that assess and classify the support needed by persons with disability to function in their chosen living, working and social environments. I-CAN is an instrument that addresses the frequency and level of support needed (not individual skills or deficits)…

The article discusses a scenario-based dieting self-efficacy scale, the DIET-SE, developed from dieter's inventory of eating temptations (DIET). The DIET-SE consists of items that describe scenarios of eating temptations for a range of dieting situations, including high-caloric food temptations. Four studies assessed the psychometric properties of…

This article describes the revision of the White Racial Consciousness Development Scale (D. Claney & W. M. Parker, 1989). A multistage approach including item generation, item refinement and selection, and evaluation of score validity and reliability was used to test construction and validation. Implications for theory, practice, and future…

Teachers' competence to estimate the effectiveness of learning materials is important and often neglected in programmes for teacher education. In this lecture I will try to explore the possibilities of designing scaffolding instruments for a "priori" assessment of language learning tasks, based on insights from SLA and cognitive psychology, more…

In this study, we investigated a new instrument: the Southampton Test of Empathy for Preschoolers (STEP). The test incorporated 8 video vignettes of children in emotional scenarios, assessing a child's ability to understand (STEP-UND) and share (STEP-SHA) in the emotional experience of a story protagonist. Each vignette included 4 emotions (angry,…

Two studies are reported presenting the development of the Adolescent Friendship Attachment Scale (AFAS), a 30 item self-report measure of adolescent close friendship conceptualized as an attachment relationship. Study One reports the results of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses with a sample of 490 adolescents aged 13 to 19 years. A…

Background: In Australia, diagnosis and management of depression in adults with intellectual disability (ID) often occurs within the primary care setting. Few tools are available to assist general practitioners (GPs) in the diagnostic process. The study aim was to assess properties of carer and GP checklists developed to address this problem.…

This article attempts to present a novel application of a method of measuring accuracy for academic success predictors that could be used as a standard. This procedure is known as the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, which comes from statistical decision techniques. The statistical prediction techniques provide predictor models and…

The professional orientation difference approach was operationalized as a stress on the importance of intellectual activity, autonomy, service and influence, with de-emphasis on the monetary, prestige, security and human relations aspects of a job. As a difference score, the index was subject to special reliability problems. This analysis…